How These Parents Are Raising Transgender Children

By Aisling McDermott

December 21, 2017

Trans kids open up about love, acceptance, and puberty to their parents.

Growing up, I was never what people would call a “tomboy,” even though people assumed I was a girl. I hated pink and liked to play in the mud, but I still played with dolls, wore dresses, and spent a good amount of time playing house with friends. When I asked my mom about my childhood and how I’d expressed myself, she said that I’d always been “in the middle” when it came to gender expression. I went through a princess phase but was also the kid who liked running around outside. I took ballet classes but also wanted to go into the sciences so that I could work with bugs. Much like Nicole, there were little hints, early on, that the gender I was assigned at birth was not the one I identified with. Looking back, I wonder if the fact that I’d never adhered to the gender roles the world expected of me was one reason why my mom wasn’t too surprised when I came out as gender-nonbinary.

I look back now and realize that, if you knew what to look for, my identity as a nonbinary person was fairly obvious. When I first thought that I should come out to my mother as nonbinary, the thought made me want to run away into the woods. I had come out to my mom as bisexual a few years earlier, and part of her still thought of it as a phase that would pass, along with my desire to wear all black and listen to nothing but emo music. While she hadn’t been unaccepting, my mom’s response to my first attempt at coming out left me wary of how she would respond to this new tidbit of information.

I’ve always seen myself as someone with a lot of different identities and labels. These labels always made me feel like I had something to prove and, being the Chinese, adopted daughter of a white, single mother, maybe I did. Growing up, I always felt a lot of pressure to be the best kid I could be. In my head, with my strange teenager logic, I’d decided that I had to be the best because I had to prove to the world that single parents could be amazing, and prove to my mom that choosing me was a good idea. She’d always raised me to believe that, while I was her little girl, I was also a strong, independent woman who could do anything a man could do.

How would she react when I told her that I wasn’t really a woman? Would she feel like I was betraying her in some way? Would she be mad at me? Would I suddenly find myself homeless? I never thought my mom would kick me out for my gender identity or sexuality, not really. The thought came to mind but part of me always knew she would never do that. What I didn’t expect though was for her to be completely accepting.

Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t feel the need to change my name; it’s already an uncommon one and never really felt gendered to me. Or maybe it was the fact that my mom had spent time coming to terms with my sexuality and, at this point, could roll with the punches. But either way, my second coming out conversation with my mom ended in a hug and an “I love you." There were no tears, no awkward silences, and no moment where I felt that she was thinking, ‘This is just a phase.’ She had her doubts about what was happening but none of them had to do with how I identified. Just like Rhys and Nicole’s mothers’, my mom was worried about what would happen to me. Would I be bullied? Would coming out make life harder for me in the future?

My mom isn’t an extremely religious person, but she believes in God. Crosses and pictures of Jesus hang on the walls of our house and, as a child, I spent every Sunday at church. I had listened, for years, as I was told that there was something wrong and sinful, about being anything but cisgender and straight. Because of this, I was worried that my mom thought the same thing, that she would react badly to my coming out. Talking to my mom years later, she told me that she hadn’t even thought about religion when I came out. Instead, she was worried about what my future would look like. For a long time, I thought that this was just a ridiculous worry but hearing other parents talk, including the parents in this video, made me realize that it’s a normal, parental thing to worry about.

Penelope with his family.

Some people are surprised by the fact that my mom was so accepting. Honestly, sometimes I am too. She’s a white woman who was raised in the '50s and '60s, after all. People of that generation tend not to be seen as very liberal individuals. My mom had a unique experience growing up though. She was the oldest child in an Air Force family, traveling all over the world while she was growing up.

Because of this, she was introduced to many different cultures and worldviews early on. Her parents were fine with her wearing overalls, even when her school wasn’t. They were fine with her reading, studying science, and spending time outside looking for bugs in the dirt. They encouraged her to be who she wanted to be and express herself how she wanted to. In many ways, my mom raised me the same way her parents did. She never forced me to do things I didn’t want. I was the one who wanted to do ballet, I was the one who wanted to join Girl Scouts, and I was the one who wanted to catch crayfish in the creek.

People ask me how and why my mom is so supportive, and, the more I think about it, the more I realize that a lot of it has to do with her background in science. She’s spent her life exploring, testing, and researching. She’s had to be open to the possibility that, one day, the answers she wanted would not be the ones she got. When I was first put in her arms, I doubt who I am today is who my mom imagined I would be. I’ve changed and grown.

Throughout all of this growth, my mom has been utterly supportive of me, no matter what. When I decided that I wanted to cut 22 inches of my hair off, she let me. She may have teared up a bit, watching all that hair fall away, but she still went with it. When I decided to quit dance, she let me, only telling me that I had to finish out the year. When I decided that I wanted to wear pants to school, something that could be done but usually wasn’t, she bought me new pants. She let me be who I wanted to be, express myself the way I wanted to, and decide, for myself, who I wanted to be. That is how you raise a child.

Aisling McDermott is a senior at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. They are nonbinary and plan to find a career in advocacy after graduating.